AWS GuardDuty analyses various events happening on your AWS account and can notify you when suspicious activity takes place. Right now, GuardDuty is specific to a region and needs to be enabled in each region you want to monitor (though AWS recommends you enable it in all regions to ensure global actions are monitored). Going through GuardDuty console in every AWS region can be a daunting task, and quite time consuming if you have multiple AWS accounts which you’d like to connect into Master-Member setup. Luckily, CloudFormation supports enabling and setting up GuardDuty detectors, so you can use it to make it a little bit less painful.

If you’re keeping in touch with new services provided by AWS, you probably heard about new security monitoring tool: GuardDuty. You probably also noticed a whole new family of Elastic Load Balancers (v2), which includes Network Load Balancers (NLB). Deploying those two new services may generate some unexpected results – and here’s why.

Thinking of moving into the Cloud or already in it, but have some questions? We are happy to help! No question is too big or too small – we can offer help extending, modifying, auditing and optimising costs of your AWS operations. Whether you have a one-off problem, or need ongoing support, get in touch and we’ll find the answer for you.

Creating snapshots from EBS drives attached to your EC2 instances is the most basic way of backing up your data. While you have to be cautious when snapshotting running EC2 instances without restart, doing it regularly is a base of many disaster recovery plans. In the latest update to aws-maintenance repo on GitHub you’ll find a complete code and CloudFormation template that will make this as painless a process as possible.

After my previous post about a complete code for automated RDS cross-region backup copy, some issues and new feature requests have been raised on GitHub (thanks for that!) – and with your help, support for encrypted RDS instances and Aurora Clusters have now been added!